Brand Development: What’s (REALLY) In a Name?
When you consider brand development options for your business, it’s important to remember that the real goal is to build trust within your target market. It is that trust in your brand that will lead to content sharing and purchase.
With this in mind, branding services come in many forms. It’s possible to garner brand development through regular email blasts, social media marketing and consistent content creation.
Email Blasts and Brand Development
Build trust within your target audience by sending out consistent emails to your permission-based email contact list. Two key points for using email as a branding service:
- Educate, Don’t Sell. Your email blasts should include timely, educational and industry-related content that will be of use to your contacts. It’s fine to include calls-to-action to spur response, but the main purpose of emails should be to educate.
- Ask First. Do not buy email lists, or mail to contacts who haven’t given you permission to send them information. It’s a little more work in the beginning to ensure a clean and approved email list, but as anyone who has ever had their email account SPAM listed can tell you, it’s well worth the effort.
Social Media Marketing to Build your Brand
Social media marketing is not only a great way to promote sales, deals and events to your company’s followers; it also allows for a significant amount of one-to-one interaction with your target audience, which is an incredibly effective way to build trust for your brand.
How?
Use your Social Media pages and sites as customer service tool. Allow your customers and prospects to ask questions and be sure to have staff ready to answer them within a day. Giving people a real-time view of how your company handles day to day scenarios suggests how you will handle their business.
Just be sure to monitor the questions and answers and handle them in the most timely and professional manner possible. Your prospects will get a sneak-peek into your customer service prowess, building their motives to turn to your company when the need arises.
Content Creation and Brand Development
There are a significant amount of benefits to consistent content creation. There are SEO benefits, both for onsite and offsite content. Content creation is also a well-established lead generation tool. But today, we’re looking at how content creation assists with trust building and brand development, so let’s look at the types of content you share.
Articles to show your industry awareness and expertise through article marketing.
Blogs to engage and educate your readers, to give a human perspective to your company’s services and products.
Case studies to illustrate how your business tackles specific client problems or issues.
Tweets and Posts for quick, snippets that show timely news, links and “in-the-moment” views of your business.
Videos take that “in-the-moment” view a little farther by showing your team, your product or service in action.
When thinking about brand development, consider how the resources available to you can be applied beyond the traditional uses then coordinate your brand image to meet those objectives.
Interested in building your brand?